Houston (San Diego?), we have contact!

Well, I talked to one of the ladies who works at the surrogacy center I want to use (Modern Family Surrogacy Center). She gave me a run-down on how the process goes, sort of a "What to Expect When You're Expecting For Somebody Else" (compensation, paperwork, medications, getting "Matched" with a couple, the IVF procedure, etc. I will have to wait a while to start the process since I have to have been done breastfeeding for a couple of months before I can get started on the paperwork to apply but that works for me because I need to give my body a little longer than 3 months to recover from having Aaron. Plus, I have my first semester of college coming up and have some things going on in June that I need to be not pregnant for. On top of that, I need to lose some of my baby weight and get to a healthy un-pregnant weight first, but that probably falls under recovering from having a baby. LOL The phone call did answer the question of whether I can be a surrogate while taking my thyroid medication (I can, since my dosage is established and I've been on the same dosage of the same medication for 2 pregnancies now and haven't had any problems or complications).

All in all, I'm even more excited now and I'm sure that this is something I want to do. My uterus was made for having babies and I love the idea of using that gift to help others.

New territory

This is all totally new territory. Well, mostly new territory. I have three small children so obviously pregnancy and childbirth are nothing new to me. What is new is that I'm looking into being a Gestational Surrogate.

I've heard plenty about Surrogate Mom's before and have thought fleetingly in the past about being an egg donor or a surrogate but it was never something I put much time or thought in to. Recently that's changed. A friend of mine just gave birth a few weeks ago to a beautiful baby girl for a wonderful couple of daddies. I started reading her blog while she was still pregnant and got a little interested then but it was when she showed me the slideshow of their birth pictures that my heart was totally captured.

I've seen births before. I've given birth before. I've seen plenty of birth photos before. But these... these grabbed me. They awoke in me such depth of emotion that I was literally in tears looking at these pictures. It wasn't just because birth is a beautiful thing, but it was seeing these daddies welcoming their beautiful daughter in to the world, and knowing that without my friend, they might not have her. It was seeing the emotion on their faces. It was seeing the pictures of her going through labor and knowing what that feels like and realizing that she went through that to give someone else the gift of having a family, the sacrifice that that was on her part.

I'm not the least bit ashamed to say that I flat-out cried my way through that slide-show.

I want to be a part of that. I love my children more than I can say. I won't lie, some days they drive me crazy. Kids have a way of doing that. I never imagined I would be saying things like

"Don't stick your head in the toilet while I'm trying to potty. You don't need to watch"
"Don't chew on the dog's ear!"
"Get off the dog, she's not a horse. No, she's not a zebra either."
"Don't shut your sister in the fridge!!!"
"Do NOT color on your brother!!!"

I never dreamed that at three weeks postpartum with my third child, after getting a grand total of three hours of sleep due to said third child being up all night screaming, I would go downstairs to discover that my three year old (instead of waking me up when she got up) had made breakfast for the dog. Breakfast, in this case, consisted of a full gallon of milk, a carton of eggs, a bottle of worcestershire sauce, and a bottle of chocolate syrup, all combined in a pan and on the floor. Nor did I think that when stepping outside to call my husband after this grisly and disconcerting discovery, this same three year old would lock me out of the house.

I certainly didn't realize that I would have creative and bright children who decided that the poop in their diapers would be an excellent artistic medium with which to create murals on the walls. I didn't think about things like having to change diapers containing rainbow colored poop after my toddler decided to eat her (non-toxic) crayongs, or needing to put the cats' litter boxes behind baby gates so my crawling child wouldn't decide to have a snack.

My kids put me through some crazy things but even when I'm at my most frustrated, I wouldn't trade them for anything. It makes me so sad that there are couples out there who, for whatever reason, can't have children on their own, and I want to help them. I want them to be able to experience both the joys and frustrations of being a parent. My body is darned good at pregnancy and I want to use that to help someone else.